Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

crimeandpunishment writes "Could it be that internet censorship in China has a pecking order? Politics and human rights are bad — but porn is okay? The porn sites that suddenly popped up in China two months ago are still accessible, leaving people wondering if it's a change in policy, a glitch, or maybe a test by the Chinese Internet police. The Chinese government isn't saying, but one Internet analyst speculates, 'Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won't pay so much attention to political matters.'"

'Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won't pay so much attention to political matters.'

Hollywood and all other kind of crappy entertainment is the best example of how to keep people from thinking too much about issues that actually matter. US people mostly care about the results of the latest American Idol episode or the latest celebrity gossip. Just see the difference between CNN and Al Jazeera front page [tinypic.com].

However porn is not a political issue. It's a cultural and religion issue. It was banned in the US too, you can still get years in jail for "obscene porn" and people go mad if there's a nipple in the TV (anyone remember Janet Jackson nipple slip?)

But culture is slowly changing in the China too and this just follows it.

I believe what the grandparent is referring to is the unbalancing of the genders due to the One Child Per Family policy and the cultural preference to have a male as opposed to a female. Since there are currently more males than females reaching sexual maturity, the government is likely worried about the social unrest this will cause since it means that the men will be unable to find a wife to start a family with.

There have been a number of articles about this in recent months and some scholars are speculating that China will encourage immigration from other countries to even up the ratio or perhaps even enact policy that will encourage the migration of the men for the same reasons. Likewise, some NGOs are worried that there will be an increase in prostitution in China since the demand will go up among men who are unable to find wives.

isn't really a bad choice if you want your culture and language to eventually dominate the world. Mandarin currently exceeds English as a spoken language by population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers).It's hardly a representational sample by any stretch of the imagination, but where I work at the moment we have at least 6 out of the 10 drivers who are from mainland China and living here in Canada at the moment. Most of them want to get Canadian citizenship eventu

Unfortunately for us English speakers, Mandarin is much harder to learn than English is for Mandarin speakers:P

I disagree. Mandarin isn't a very hard language. Chinese writing, however, is very much harder than English writing to learn... But even then, once you have a thousand characters or so down, the rest are a lot easier to learn.

Just counting the number of native speakers fails to take a lot into account.

1) Which language do you count as native for people who are genuinely bilingual (as I was when I was young?). This is very common in South Asia.

2) There are a huge number of people who speak English fluently as a second language. The article you link to suggests that the total number of English speakers could be 80% greater than the number of Mandarin speakers.

3) English is far more geographically diverse (how many people speak Ma

Men generally do not marry for sex. Not in the USA, not in Asia, not anywhere. If a man has a wife he's still going to see the prostitute. And in Asian history it was common for a man to have multiple wives.

So the prostitution issue is completely separate from all of this. They should legalize prostitution so that it's safe and expect prostitution to be popular in every country with married or unmarried men.

So the prostitution issue is completely separate from all of this. They should legalize prostitution so that it's safe and expect prostitution to be popular in every country with married or unmarried men.

So the prostitution issue is completely separate from all of this. They should legalize prostitution so that it's safe and expect prostitution to be popular in every country with married or unmarried men.

You don't think women want male prostitutes also?

I'm for that too, but since most women are traditional minded and care about what other women think of them, they don't go to a male prostitute out of fear of being labeled.

Why would anyone worry about a rise in prostitution? One should celebrate it!
And just how sane can a massively over populated nation such as China be if it desires immigration? It would be far more sane if they just ran wild in the streets until most of the population was dead. Over population is by far the greatest of all perils facing all of us.

I believe what the grandparent is referring to is the unbalancing of the genders due to the One Child Per Family policy and the cultural preference to have a male as opposed to a female. Since there are currently more males than females reaching sexual maturity, the government is likely worried about the social unrest this will cause since it means that the men will be unable to find a wife to start a family with.

I would've expected that the "market" would've eventually taken care of this. I.e. if female

Welcome to the country where the general populace will consider Tiger Woods saying something at a press conference to be breaking news and what is happening in Washington, the Middle East, and the Gulf of Mexico to not even be front page worthy.:D

1. For a start I'm not sure if government regulation in China is as much bowing to the general culture, as just basically trying to shape it into something that's not threatening the status quo.

Traditionalism and "we're holier than the West" has been the battlecry of just about every tin-horn dictator or clique/junta. E.g., you only have to look at Eastern Europe to see a bunch of countries who were on one hand chest-thumpingly secular, yet played the sanctity of the family card worse than the stereotypical bible-thumping fundies. The general idea when you want to keep a bunch of people in line, seems to be along the lines of (A) don't change what works, as long as "works" means us being at the top, (A1) new ideas are bad, (B) the West is actually a place of oppression and scary depravity and generally all the evils imaginable, and only a degenerate would take ideas from them. Because ultimately appeal to tradition and xenophobia is all anyone has to support why nobody should even think of newfangled stuff like multi-party elections or uncensored press.

(Well, other than "and we'll shoot you if you disagree", but that tends to make people unhappy if it's the official doctrine as opposed to just the subtext.)

So basically all I'm saying is that China really doesn't have much choice but to at least pretend it's against it. Because it has to be against just about everything the West does differently. It can't go and admit, "you know, America had a lot of good ideas. What a country!" because then it gives more people the idea "so why don't we try to be more like them?" And by now that wouldn't be just bad for the party at the top, but for the whole pyramid of corrupt kleptocrats bribing them too. I bet just the idea for example that those workers demanding rights instead of sticking to the Chinese way, is probably making a few sphincters clench so hard they turn shit into diamonds.

2. That something continues to exist in a corrupt system, well, I wouldn't necessarily take it as official acknowledgement that it's ok. The modus operandi in just about any corrupt system is that you can get away with just about anything if you bribe the right people or are related to them, and it doesn't directly piss off someone higher than them. (So political opposition is still basically out.) Occasionally they'll need to make a spectacular example of someone, but half the time it'll be of those who didn't bribe enough, and the other half it's just the cost of doing business.

So basically what the Chinese government may be really thinking about those sites might actually be more along the lines of "oh, that one is operated by comrade Chang's son-in-law, the other one is by Wang's best buddy, and that other one is paying the bribes fair and square." Occasionally some big speech will be made condemning them, a few of the small fish who thought it's ok for them too will be make a public example of, and life will continue. And occasionally Chang or Wang will fall from grace for other reasons and their protege will be made an example of too, just as a mean of extra revenge, or so Wang's or Chang's successor will seem all intransigent and tough on crime (which will almost invariably mean: to make some room for his own proteges.) And again life will continue like before.

It doesn't even really have to be something "ominous", etc.; from to time something nice gets through. My place was behind the Iron Curtain, but not many people realize today (even / especially locally) that we actually had...reasonably decent, given the circumstances, freedom of speech. You could say really a lot, as long as it was in in the right place and time - most notably cabarets or concerts; almost openly treated by the regime as some sort of venting area. Not much different, perhaps even in slightly better style, than free speech zones / First Amendment Zones.

I know, it's so lame. If they expect us to be pliant sheep, the least they could do is give is real bloodsport, not the watered down "sports" we have today. Sports without real-world consequences is like kissing your sister. I want deaths.

:-) I'm sure there's some war footage that could satisfy your tastes... Place your bets on who gets shot first... It would be a bit more difficult to rig than your regular stadium sports there. Gladiators gone wild... Or an Animal Planet program on warriors in their natural element. See the ten year old get his brains splattered on the wall while his sister's cadaver smolders nearby.. fun for the whole family.

Only if you consider porn illegitimate, but in my opinion, you need to be politically/religiously insane to do that. Average people can watch porn or even directly visit prostitutes and otherwise be normal members of society just fine.

If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition what so ever and the shear size of the population, it must be extremely proffitable for those who can get in there even if for a few weeks, days or even hours. So if an owner of a handfull of porn sites is able to keep from being filtered, perhaps by a sizable under the counter bribe, then they still stand to make a lot of money. Either way it shows that whoever is in charge of looking after the filter is either corrupt or incompitent and thus a very good argument to why the whole idea is very bad in the first place.

If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition what so ever and the shear size of the population, it must be extremely proffitable for those who can get in there even if for a few weeks, days or even hours. So if an owner of a handfull of porn sites is able to keep from being filtered, perhaps by a sizable under the counter bribe, then they still stand to make a lot of money. Either way it shows that whoever is in charge of looking after the filter is either corrupt or incompitent and thus a very good argument to why the whole idea is very bad in the first place.

Don't forget gender imbalance either. Due to families preferring boys (and widespread abortion when it turns out it's going to be a girl) now China has a 120:100 male to female ratio. So yes, China is a huge market for porn indeed...

Yep. They don't seem to "get it" that the one-child policy combined with a cultural preference for male children is going to get in the way of any ambition they might entertain for "world domination" of any kind.

no what they have is 120 million "boys" of which a good chunk are in the right age to serve in the rank and file military and have no chance of finding a wife (unless they have some truely epic bonuses).

I work in a foreign language school in the uk which caters mainly to Chinese students looking to learn English for further education in English speaking countries over the last 4 years we have seen a shift from mainly boys (about 70%) to the majority being girls.While this only shows what well off families are investing more in there daughters it is as I say only a small section in of the population.

All of successful China is corrupt. Not saying the US isn't too, but there it's more blatant. This is the country you have to pay around $30,000 to graduate your university on top of what you just payed for 4 years of school payable to some random person who will "make it happen". Not to mention you end up paying someone for the privilege of working for them (certainly keeps turnover down!). Not a single bit of what goes on over there is shocking or surprising. It's just par the course. Corruption is built into their culture. This sadly coming from someone who actually likes China, and thinks it's a nice place to go, and would live there if not for the insane amount of corruption.

The differences between China and US on corruption is that: in China, corruption is widespread from top officials to illiterate migrant workers but it is mostly illegal and can get you executed; whereas in the US, it is not as widespread, concentrated among the top offices, but is mostly made legal by carefully packaging it as legal activities -- donation, lobbying -- under the name of the democracy.

All of successful China is corrupt. Not saying the US isn't too, but there it's more blatant. This is the country you have to pay around $30,000 to graduate your university on top of what you just payed for 4 years of school payable to some random person who will "make it happen"

Chinese don't pay for porn though. I don't know if it's a cultural thing about buying stuff online or just the lack of means to pay. Credit cards are not as widely available, and many US credit card processors will deny transactions from certain countries due to high risk of fraud. Most webmasters, porn or not, consider traffic from China to be a waste of bandwidth. Hopefully it will change because it indeed is a huge untapped marked.

No they won't. You can't be profitable unless people buy your stuff. Chinese people won't buy you porn because they don't have enough disposable income. Even if they had, there are no payment processors willing to work with credit cards from China.

Do you think money grows on trees, or somehow, their clicking mouses transfer money from their bank account to yours?:) No, advertisers pay for ads because the opportunity to gain your visitors attention is worth more than what they pay for the ad. Chinese people doesn't buy anything so no one wants to pay to advertise for them.

If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition

Come to Shanghai, if you think that's the case. After buying a few hundred porn DVDs, I'll show you so many barbershops and saunas and BJ bars you'll die from dehydration from shooting so many loads...

China's missing a lot of things from the Western world, but cheap, available porn and sex are NOT two of those things.

You have to realize that in China, the government is like the weather. It just sort of happens and nobody can do anything about it. Everyone's getting along fine, and the all the sudden one day, boom, a new policy is published and everything is turned upside down. There's no public discussions, no hints on what's in the pipeline, just the final policy. In my city, one day, boom, they banned motorcycles. The announcement was made through the pro-government media, and you had 30 days to figure out how to manage life without your crotch rocket. They changed a law that greatly affected truck taxi drivers, and there were actual protests, a thing that happens a lot more than you'd think in China. (protesting against the government is seen as a right-wing act and has been banned since the founding of the People's Republic).

Everything to do with the GFW is strange, too, because it's secret. They don't even bother to announce policies. Probably some faction of the Information Ministry (it used to be much cooler when it was called the Propaganda Ministry) won a power struggle against some other faction. If porn is unblocked, yay, better for me. I hate VPNs, I have never had a reliable experience with one that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. VPNs also have terrible connectivity to sites inside China, which is where I spend a lot of my working time. Besides, it's just cooler to browse the web with a.cn IP address.

You reminded me of the twitter mock in China just blocked JiangNanXi in their search function. Just today people in Canton (or GuangDong province you may call) assembled together in JiangNanXi Road protesting for the attempts of elimination of Cantonese from Canton. The government first suggested an elimination of Cantonese from local TV programmes and then a famous general born in Canton several hundred years ago had his punch line removed from his statue in a park. Meanwhile some elementary schools are f

The difference between a dialect and a language has always been more of a political and cultural question than one of linguistics. If the Roman Empire had survived until today in western europe, French, Spanish and Italian (as spoken today!) would be latin dialects, not languages. (That is about how different Mandarin and Cantonese are)

That 'wrong' stink you smell? it is called nationalism, a modern variant of the human tribal instinct. Take a good sniff, you should be able to smell it in your own nation n

As I said, Cantonese aligns better against old poems writings, especially those written in the more "glorious" eras of China. It even get its pronunciation acceptably matching from the old dictionaries written at that time. So one of the forces of rebound from the speaking language unification policy also stems from nationalism. A few people in Canton even proclaim in forums that Cantonese should better be the standard instead. Some people also use Sun Yat-sen, the Father of Republic of China, being born i

Yea, It's more or less the same in democratic countries though, I mean the current government decided to hike the "danger levies" (ACC) of motorcycles by a factor of four, effectively pricing many out of what was an economical and somewhat "green" mode of transport. I realise that I must sound like a spoilt child comparing a liberal democracy to a Maoist/Lenninist/ect totalitarian state, but to me it's really more of an issue of the scope of government than who is entitled to make the laws.

People need bread and want circuses. Given enough of both, not much else is required.

Revolutions happen when "bread" gets too expensive. If there is insufficient bread available, and it's the fault of the ruling class, there is no logical reason not to slaughter them and take their bread. The last time this happened in China was very recently, in 1948.

People need bread and want circuses. Given enough of both, not much else is required.

Revolutions happen when "bread" gets too expensive. If there is insufficient bread available, and it's the fault of the ruling class, there is no logical reason not to slaughter them and take their bread. The last time this happened in China was very recently, in 1948.

Smart rulers understand this.

Are you really saying the last economically motivated revolution in the world was China's?

In Orwell's novel, the "prole" masses, which make up 85% of the population, do have access to porn.

Quote:

"The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted."

Letting the people of no consequence do what they want in these regards helps to keep them down.

"It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations."

The porn is multibillion industry, where small investments are returned pretty fast. Why shall China ban this industry, if it makes them billions?
Since India is taking over China's dominance in cheap labour and mass production, they are looking for alternatives to feed all these people. If they find a way, this is good for them.
I think the owners of these sitesm viewable from China, paid lots of money to someone with high rank in the Internet censorship there.

Seriously, do you guy know how hard it is to find "real" Chinese porn?? If you bring attention to them then the Chinese government will have to shut them down. Damn, I am sick of always looking and Japanese porn.

Heck no! People follow the rules of the road in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They don't just ignore the rest of the world and go where they heck they want to go, screw everyone else on the road style, like REAL Chinese do...

Who gains from a ban on porn? The religious factions. This isn't something the Chinese communist party wants to promote. Banning porn also has the effect of eliminating an avenue of sexual release in a country where the young men outnumber the women. So instead of getting off in front of the computer screen, they go after the girl (or boy) next door. And the resulting civil unrest is exploited by these religious factions as well.

The Chinese are smart. They are watching the consequences of our missteps and the resulting social unrest and making adjustments to policies to prevent the same thing from occurring there.

you mention release, catharsis, as a valid psychological goal, and the chinese are so smart to see that

well, voting, participating in your government, is an equally valid form of release, but of political anxiety rather than sexual anxiety. but the chinese don't do that. so whatever sexual anxiety they are allowing to be released leading to social stability is way, way more than outclassed by the political instability they don't allow to be released, thus making their politica

One simple reason why China can never be a democracy. "One Child" policy. it is needed, it is essential and without China would soon need all its resources just to control the food riots and clean up the countless starvation corpses.

But would anyone vote for it? Hell no. Just as the US will never vote to have SUV drivers neutered.

Dictatorship is underrated when it comes to being able to make decisions that have to be made but aren't popular.

democracy is not mob rule. really. i leave it to your boundless intelligence as to why, as i don't have the time nor patience nor the intellectual charity in a comment board to explain the obvious to you

so thank you for demolishing the idea of mob rule, but when you'd like to say something intelligent about democracy, get back to me

and finally, if you have so little faith in democracy, however logically incoherent your reasons why, why don't you go live in an autocracy. gee, i don't see you packing. i wonde

Most of the Chinese population is made up of poor peasants. Give them the vote and they'll vote themselves a pile of goodies. On credit. Fortunately, the Chinese are pretty well educated (for their standard of living). So they'll have less of a problem with being swayed by manipulative groups (warlords, theocrats, etc.) Voting works best when you have a population that isn't swayed by the likes of a bunch of holy rollers. Look at Hamas. The Palestinians got the vote and lo

Imagine you are the Chinese secret service and trying to hunt down 'criminals' that try to circumvent the Great Firewall in pursuit of their 'criminal' activity. Sooner or later, you'll get frustrated because 99% of the leads you follow end up being porn downloads. By allowing porn, maintaining the Great Firewall becomes manageable again because the ones that you now detect circumventing it are now the ones you really care about.

..or "Oh look, shiny thing!". I wouldn't put it past China to have that sort of mindset when it comes to their population, so sure, it's plausible to me that they'd let a porn site or three slip through the cracks, hoping that having something to fap to will occupy them enough to not pay attention to the fact that their government doesn't respect their rights as human beings and is otherwise at least as corrupt as any South American junta government.

I think it takes a certain mind-set to see pornography as anything but a non-issue, these days. The fact that references to the subject seem to be regarded as a mark of sophistication here on slashdot probably tells a lot about the prevalent state of mind of people here; you guys should try, once, to step back a bit and look at the thing critically: as literature, movie or pictorial arts go, this is pretty poor stuff, to say the least - and as for the sexual content, it is like watching Ken and Barbie squee

A comparison of Orwell's 1984 vs. Huxley's Brave New World made the following comment:

In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

It appears that the western world is gradually tightening the reins on the populace by giving them (us) more and more banal pleasure, so that we don't object to the loss of freedom. Alternately, it seems that China is reducing dissension and unhappiness by giving the populace more and more banal pleasure, wit